


To Sail Away, Not Drift, Not Tie at Anchor

by hanktalkin



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Blue Hawke, F/F, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Multi, Sailing, Self-Esteem Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-23
Updated: 2019-01-23
Packaged: 2019-10-15 06:08:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17523335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hanktalkin/pseuds/hanktalkin
Summary: “Aren’t they adorable? I just want to dip them in butter and gobble them right up."“Sometimes you scare me Rivaini.”





	To Sail Away, Not Drift, Not Tie at Anchor

“Aren’t they adorable? I just want to dip them in butter and gobble them right up.”

“Sometimes you scare me Rivaini.”

Isabela makes a dismissive motion with her hand and downs her tankard, never taking her eyes off the show. The young couple is sprawled over the chair in corner of the tavern, an open display of debauchery if Isabela ever saw one. Merrill is always so precise, so careful with her affections when in public—it’s a pleasure and a marvel when it all breaks down with a little booze.

“If you’re scared of anything, it should be for Hawke’s bodice. It’s about twelve degrees southeast of being doused with mead.” Even as she warns it, Merrill tips further into Hawke’s lap, the drink several proofs too hard for her sloshing dangerously against its sides. It settles, but Isabela figures it’ll only be minute or two before it tries to escape again.

Hawke is middling: not as sloshed as Merrill, but not as staunch as the well-practiced Captain Isabela, who’s been matching her drink for drink. (As it should be. It’s part of _pirate_ , and Isabela wouldn’t change it, no matter how many times Hawke mummers in her ear when she’s losing the edges of soon to be forgotten nights. It’s unavoidable. It’s the job.) Hawke buries her face in Merrill’s neck and Merrill _giggles_.

Girls giggle. Women purr or hum or scream if you’re doing it right, but only girls that have only ever seen a ship from port _giggle_. There’s something to be said for that: that some people are still untouched by the sea. Some people are still untouched by _her_.

A little bit of mead gets on Hawke’s shirt.

“Remind me not to bring anyone back to the tavern,” Varric notes as Hawke blatantly ignores the stain growing in the white strings across her bosom. “You look at me like that, and I’m afraid you might unhinge your jaw right there.”

“If I found you were traipsing around behind Bianca’s back, I might have to,” she says. “Now, pay for my drink.”

“And why would I do that?” he asks. Hawke kisses Merrill’s neck again.

“Because if I pay for my own, I won’t have any money for you to win off me in cards.”

His elbow on the bar, he toasts in defeat. “Isabela, you have a way with words and other people’s money. You should’ve been a merchant.”

Victory hard fought and won, she grins.

Her thoughts return to Hawke. To Merrill. It’s hard not to—half the Hanged Man is looking at them as they make a go of it in front of the fireplace. Merrill’s going to be mortified in the morning. Oh well. Isabela will stop it if it gets indecent.

But even once she’s seen (and taken, and absorbed) the physicality of the scene, there’s still another layer of _them_ underneath it. The two of them together, existing. In love. Isabela feels something about that, although she’s not sure what emotion to assign to it. Happiness she supposes, as she told Hawke, but that doesn’t cover the whole spectrum of it. There’s more to be said about the subject. If only she knew what.

It’s not that she hasn’t thought of Them before—them and her, together, wild unclothed—in fact, there’s scant few people she _hasn’t_ thought about. Fenris, Sebastian, Meredith, Bethany, Lusine, Dumar, Petrice, Aveline…Yes, even Aveline. She’s not picky when she’s knuckles deep and too drunk to fall asleep. But there’s off about her fantasies when she starts to imagine in multiples, something she can’t put her finger on it, no matter how many times they camp together on the Wounded Coast and she runs it through her mind. Dragged up and down again, like fingers in sand.

She thinks of it when Hawke burns some qunari bodies. She thinks of it when they putter outside the Chantry and Merrill basks like a cat in the sun. She thinks of it while she walks back to the estate with both of them hanging off her like barnacles on a hull.

Hawke’s asleep as soon she tosses her on the bed, snoring with her ass in the air. Isabela takes a bit more care with Merrill, setting her down and folding up just the edge of the comforter. “There you are.” Her voice is reticent, despite the fact that Hawke’s snuffling could wake the dead. “No bedtime stories, though.”

It’s a joke, but that’s never stopped Merrill before, and so Isabela almost knows what to expect when a pale hand grabs her forearm.

Almost, but not quite. Her eyes are wide, green, filed with confusion and mild terror as though she can’t exactly remember where she is right now. Isabela is halfway to a soothing platitude when she says, “why does she like me, Isabela?”

Isabela blinks. The hand is strong, and shaking, and she isn’t sure if Merrill actually knows what she’s saying, but she replies, “what do you mean kitten?”

“I’m not…” Merrill struggles, through haze or despair or both, it’s unclear. “She’s so pretty and brave and kind and…what if one day she realizes that next to her I’m just a…weed. That’s dragging her under.”

“I think you’re mixing your metaphors there,” Isabela notes as she sits on the bed. “Now tell me what brought this on.”

Merrill bites her lip. Some of her braids are coming loose on the bed sheets, strands wild and uncertain. “She tells me I’m perfect. Her…and you…you treat me like I’ve never done anything wrong. Like I’ll never _do_ anything wrong. But you understand anything, either of you. I do things that are dangerous.”

“Merrill. We’re very aware of the blood magic.”

That’s apparently the wrong thing to say, because Merrill sits up in a fit of determination. “You say that but you don’t _know_. If you did you’d be more careful, you’d-”

“Merrill.” She takes her hands, both of them, thin little things folding in the calluses of her own. “There’s something you should know about the world. And that’s if it’s worth it, then you stay close, no matter what you think might be around the corner. The risk is the reward. And sometimes, you ride the edges of the storm just because you can.”

Merrill contemplates that for a bit. Eventually she falls back against pillow, her eyes still clouded, her thoughts and inebriation taking her far away. Isabela waits a couple extra minutes, but then Merrill’s breathing becomes easy, and her eyes close. Faintly, enough that Isabela might be imagining it, she says, “I don’t feel like a storm. I feel like a sinkhole.”

Isabela presses a kiss to her forehead. “You’re not kitten. Hawke will tell you so in the morning.”

She stays, longer than strictly necessary. Long enough that her joints pop when she moves again, and the curtains filter the grease-clouded sun. Long enough that she’s falling, and she doesn’t think she can stop.

* * *

She hides for three years.

She’s never too far, but she’s out of sight, and whenever Hawke corners her with a “come by the estate some time,” or an “I never see you anymore,” she can brush it off with an casual complaint about the quantity of guards out and about these day. Really shameful. Don’t they have better things to do than bustle around outside the Rose?

Hawke always nods, the jovial smile replaced by a false one. It’s easy. So, painfully easy. Some people just aren’t difficult keep at arms length, especially those who won’t push when they can feel something’s wrong.

That’s why it takes Aveline shoving one of her big sausage fingers in Isabela’s face for her to take the hint. “Talk. To. Them.”

“Them?” Isabela raises a once perfectly styled eyebrow that, if she’s honest, hasn’t had a trim in far too long. “I didn’t know the Coterie wanted their money so bad they started getting guard dogs to do their shakedowns.”

“Isabela so help me-”

“Down Big Girl,” Isabela warns. Those gauntlets are dangerously close to her neck, and she happens to like breathing out of that neck. “Don’t force yourself. Watching you try to come up with creative threats is like watching a bard fart out of a flute.”

Aveline glares, and Isabela relents, turning her cheek. She’s not _afraid_ of the Captain, far from—but she knows a green light before a squall when she sees one. If she doesn’t take this sign to heart, she may lose.

And she hates losing.

Merrill’s arms wrap around her when she visits one day, the alienage home crammed with dust that gets in her nose. Some of it is even from after when Merrill moved out. Isabela smiles, makes a joke at the expense of the wilting mirror in the back, and catches the joy in Hawke’s eyes as she watches from the corner. She hugs back, and takes a seat while Merrill pours her some water. It’s like she was never gone.

They drink, they make merry, Hawke kills some people and Isabela takes their things. Every day she disappears more as she becomes tangled in them, threads pulling together to make a sloppy and ill-fitting tapestry.

The tighter they grow the more she’s afraid it’s going to rip.

“Come along Hawke. I’ll tell you what: I’ll even let you be my first mate. How does that sound?”

Hawke snorts, and throws back her rum. “Sounds like that should entitle me to a larger share of the booty.”

Isabela leans in close, her voice milking every syllable as she says, “well, we’ll have to see your _performance_ first, sailor, before we know how just much _booty_ you’ll be getting.”

It’s a dance, a duel so close to the edge of a cliff that Isabela can practically hear the waves below. Back foot, front foot, never letting Hawke know how much she means it when she says _come sail away with me_. Never letting, but _needing_ her to know all the same. That goodbye is the same thing as losing.

“One third,” Hawke says, hunching so her head is level with Isabela’s. “And one third for Merrill.”

“What will we give to the rest of the crew then?” Isabela muses. Strike.

“Well I’ll assume you’ll be splitting your share with them,” Hawke replies. Parry. “What is a captain if not generous?”

A chuckle. “Captain, maybe. Pirate, not on Andraste’s smallclothes.” She drinks. “What is Merrill going to be doing that’s worth a third of the takings?”

“Lookout of course.” Check, forward, right. “Have you seen her climb up the vines on the side of the estate when she thinks she’s seen a bird’s nest?”

This time it’s a full on laugh as Isabela sees it in her mind’s eye, the elf running around the dock and scrambling from rigging to rigging. “The best lookout this side of the Waking Sea!” she cheers. “That is, until she actually needs to look out for anything. We’d run aground if she ever thought one of our compasses needed fixing.”

An that’s the end of her. Because now in her mind live the three of them, out on the high seas with every horrible curse of this place behind them, and she’ll never let that image go. Together, forever, one adventure after another, and their spirits soaring with every pitch of the waves. Hawke is laughing, but Isabela’s stumbled backwards off the cliff and she isn’t coming back up.

* * *

The ship creaks, fog so thick she might just kill them all if she hadn’t been staring at this harbor every day for the past six years of her life. The shroud bounces lazily against her shoulder, the rails so small she could reach both arms out and touch either side, and she’s reminded _boat. Boat, not ship._

She casts a glance over her shoulder; her friends just where she’d left them. Varric is thumbing over Bianca, unusually quiet, more in shock than he’ll ever let her know. It isn’t every day this happens. (It isn’t every day hundreds die in an instant and thousands more follow after.) But he wasn’t really what she was looking for.

At the back of the boat, with the last of the Gallows’ architecture disappearing behind them framing them in all its haunting glory, are the two people that are unequivocally _hers_. There’s a gash on Merrill’s face, healed to the best of her ability but still trickling red down her chin. She rests on Hawke’s shoulder, the other woman’s hand crossing over to grip hers. They’re still. In pain. But alive.

(More than can be said for Bethany. For Anders. For all the others who are never going to see the next day’s sun burn away the mist.)

Isabela forces herself to look away. Not that she’s any better facing forward than back in this fog, but it’s her responsibility to guide this rickety little boat to salvation, and damn if she isn’t going to do everything in her power to get them free. She keeps their picture in her mind as steers, piloting through soundless bay, an old sea chantey rising unbidden to her lips.

She’s stolen her home, and she’s taking it away. 


End file.
